From Keywords to Short Form Video: Marketing Evolution with Mickey Mellen

Welcome to the BizTech Superhero, the podcast that empowers you to unleash the technology superpowers within your business. I'm your host, Joshua McNary. I'm joined today by today's superhero, Mickey Mellon, technical managing partner at Green Mellon based in Marietta, Georgia, to talk about tech inside his web marketing firm. Mickey, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks, Josh. Good to be here. So Mickey, for folks that are just meeting you for the first time today, could you share a little bit about who you are and what you do? Sure. So I'll kind of go way back to the early 2000s, maybe kind of the 2008 kind of range. That's when our company got started. It's also roughly when we met, we met around the same time my company started. So you and I met through a very geeky technology kind of stuff. We were both heading to a the Wear 2.0 conference about geo stuff and Google Earth and all that. And we were both tweeting from separate separate airplanes with this conference hashtag connected there and have known each other since then. So that was the super technology on that. But then yeah, I worked at a church at the time and left the church to start my own company. And a friend of mine from the church, Allie, also left to start her own company. We got together in 2009 to start Green Mellon, or Allie Green, Mickey Mellon, Green Mellon. There you go. We've been building websites and stuff ever since and doing digital marketing and a lot more in the recent decade in the messaging and just kind of figuring out stories and making sure that all is cohesive through everything. It's been a fun journey. Absolutely. Yeah, it's fun how we met back in the early days of some of the tweeting and social medias of the time and have stayed in touch over the years. That's a fun origin story for us. But as far as the company goes, what's your specialty now? I mean, there's a lot of web marketing firms and such. So take a moment and explain kind of what your what your angle is on the market. You mentioned the strategy and the content and such. But just me give a little more context to that. For sure. Yeah. So websites are still the core of what we do. Any successful marketing is still going to lead to a website. We build WordPress powered sites. That's kind of been our core. That's still the main core of what we do. It's about a third of our business, but it's still the main piece people need. But before we build sites, we require that we do some degree of messaging strategy. So if you're familiar with building a story brand or those kinds of ideas, like we spent about a month understanding your story, who you're trying to serve, why they should care about you and why you're better than your competitors, why you're worse than your competitors, just understanding all that stuff to then go into the site. And then on the backside, once the site is built, there's other pieces. We'll do a marketing strategy to figure out where you should spend your time online, where are your customers. Should you be on TikTok or should you be on LinkedIn or should you do more to get your stuff to show up in chat GPT or should you be doing email newsletters or probably some combination of a few of those and then kind of helping companies build from there, measure the data and kind of keep on going. So it's kind of that whole flow in a perfect world. Again, we have relatively few clients that do all that. They'll come to us with an existing site need marketing help or different pieces. But in a perfect world, say, "Hey, let's do the messaging for who you are, what you're about, build a beautiful website and then market after that." And that's kind of the goal there. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my audience knows my pitch regarding strategy around technology and what you're doing there in the web marketing space is building strategies and not just doing things, but actually trying to make it work in an outcome based solution based model, which is awesome. That's why we get along so well. So yeah, great to hear that. And I'm sure a lot of the people that are listening that know me can relate to the messaging that you're throwing out there with regards to what you were all doing down in Georgia. Okay, well, let's get into technology and how your firm uses it. I mean, you're a technologist. That's why we get along. We met in a geeky way. But tell us how you're incorporating technology here in 2025 in regards to your firm and kind of what are some of the highlights and things that are exciting you right now with regards to technology inside your business. Yeah, so it's an interesting question. Like, how do we incorporate technology? Like, it's all technology. I mean, everything you do is technology from how we communicate to how we practice our project management to everything we do. But yeah, in terms of what's different in 2025, I think the big shift for us is how AI is impacting search. You know, search isn't going away, but it's changing a lot. And we can get pretty deep into this. I'll kind of do the quick overview is that so the way I've heard it's phrased is Google is a reward for getting your marketing right in all the other channels. You know, we're seeing people search Google a lot more as a place to do research. They go to Google to see who they want at the end, because they do the research on TikTok, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, via email, talking to friends on next door, in chat GBT, those kind of places. So how do we get our clients to show up in those places so that people say, Oh, they're the answer. That's the company I need. And then they go to Google to find their website and they type it in there. And that's a big shift. You know, people certainly still do some research on Google. I'm not saying it's all gone SEO is not dead, but it's certainly changed a lot. And we just don't focus on that as much anymore. We're not worried about, you know, ranking well for new homes in Atlanta, Georgia, whatever on LinkedIn or on Google, because people just aren't searching it there. They're, again, they're seeing cool videos and seeing other things and talking to friends. And then they go to the site and type in that home builder, you know, company to find their site there. So it's a pretty big shift. And it's been fun though. It's fascinating to watch and follow the trends. The other challenge with that too, though, is it's much harder to track. You know, it used to be we could track every little thing that happens. And now we can't as much because along with the changes I mentioned, all the social media platforms are discouraging links more and more and more. I've heard a study that says your content of social media will get 10 times the engagement if you don't have a link in it. So you don't want to put links in your social media stuff, but then you can't track it. People will see your post on social media, see how great you are, then they'll manually go to Google typing your address and find you. So it's a win. You did it. But you don't really know why, for sure, because it just shows that it came from Google. And that's a challenge we also see if people have analytics, they'll say, Oh, man, our best traffic is coming from Google. So we need to invest more in Google. And that's not necessarily true because it probably came because that cool thing you did on Reels or wherever it happened, it's just hard to put it together. And so it's a challenge, but a fun one. And we're seeing good results from a lot of that. Okay, so the two themes I picked out of there that I want to explore with you a little bit are you implied that the brand SEO, so like the direct brand SEO to be found easily, once they know who you are, that's still relevant. And that's always been the easiest thing to rank for, as you're actual. Okay, so that there's that component that still seems relevant and useful, kind of in the traditional SEO sense. But it's because they're finding you elsewhere and other channels or perhaps in the AI search and things like this that leads to that. And then the other part that you were talking about was the attribution component, the fact that it's hard to properly attribute where the leads or the opportunities are coming from. Because back in the old days, we were able to track everything. It was all linked together with the cookies and the search things. And of course, there's been a general privacy trend over the last decade even that has led to that. But then we also have the pressures of these platformers wanting to keep you within their platform, so that people like us or our clients will end up needing to pay them to be in that platform. So those are some of the themes I heard there. I guess with regards to your business for Green Mellon, how have you seen this play out for you in regards to your ability to market them? As I recall in prior conversations, and it's true for my business, there's a lot of referral, direct referral happening, but from a standpoint of people finding you and or discovering you outside of listening to this podcast, how are they finding you? And how are you keeping track of that in the search and AI world that we're in? Yeah, so a big shift we've made for ourselves and for our clients is shifting away from traditional keyword SEO stuff into short form video. We're doing a lot more short form video for ourselves again and for our clients. And that seems to be helping a lot. Again, it's hard to measure for sure, but we've seen two big clients. I guess I'll back up a little bit. So Ali, my business partner, has been doing some short form video. I'll come up with topic ideas for you, kind of write a script, and she'll do it. And she does a great job with those. We've had two of her old friends that have reached out that run big companies saying, "Oh, I didn't realize you did that. I need your help." And they've become great clients of ours. And I attribute that to them seeing the video of her and saying, "Oh, I know Ali. Oh, she does this stuff and she has great solutions." And then finding us. And again, we're not getting a click from that. We're just having to to measure it ourselves. And the solution seems to be to some of this attribution is ask people how they found you. But that's still worth doing. You should ask them how they found you, but they're not usually right. Like it's often wrong. I've seen two stats on that that really stood out. One is when you give people a list of options, like how did you find us? A, B, C, D, or E. A and B win every time. No matter what order you put them in, people choose the top ones. And then I saw kind of an anecdote, but it was a company that is, the company references a big YouTube channel quite a lot. They're not related to them. All the YouTube channels never mentioned them, but they reference a lot. And one of the questions was, did you find us? How did you find us? And one was because of that YouTube channel. And like 20% of the people said was because of that YouTube channel, which could not have been the YouTube channels never mentioned them, never advertised. But people like, "Oh, yeah, I guess they're with that YouTube stuff." Just the affiliation. Just the affiliation. It's whatever the most recent thing is that they, that pops up their head that's affiliated to that list you're looking at. Right. But that's not how they found them at all. They couldn't have found them that way. So it's, yeah, I never know. And so the challenge becomes like, like for us, our CPA firm that we use, we saw this guy named Jason Blummer speak at a conference 10 years ago. And he did a great job. He was fascinating. Like this guy's cool. So we followed his blog and followed his podcast. It's kind of followed him from afar for years. And then a few years ago, Ally and I said, "We need a new CPA. Who should we get? Let's get Jason." So I went to Google and typed in Jason Blummer, found his site, clicked on it, hired him and all that. And again, if he has good metrics, they'll say, "Wow, they found us from Google, but Google's doing great for us." And no, we didn't really. Again, it's good that you show up with your name. You need to have that. But we found you because you do great podcasts and blogging, you speak and things that you just can't connect one to one. And it's a challenging place to be. I'm seeing other, other things I've seen online. So Rand Fishkin, you're probably familiar with Rand, you're obviously spending up, but he had SEO mods. He ran for years. Now SparkToro that we'll probably talk about later. But he talks about he's seeing companies are complaining like, "Our traffic's dropping. Our revenue's going up, but we're getting less traffic." And smart people are not upset by that. They know it's better traffic coming inside. It's the branded traffic coming. They're getting more sales, but their bosses are saying, "No, no, we need to get more traffic." Traffic's getting like, "No, it's not. It's revenue. We're getting more sales out of this. It's working." What actually is the outcome we're going for? Correct. Exactly. Yeah. And that's something we try to work with our team and with our clients. Again, we don't build websites because no one wants a website. They want to get traffic, and they don't want traffic. They want to get sales. And so it's all like, "What is it really going to lead to?" And so it's important to keep the end in mind when we're doing this stuff. If we're giving you more sales, that's a win. Even if your traffic's down, engagement's down, whatever, you're getting more of the right people and just fewer of the wrong people. And it's a win, but it's different. Well, it comes back to the fact that you're, it's scary, right? I mean, there's been these traditional models for whether it's our firms or these clients that you're referencing that are wanting more traffic or whatever. There's these models. There's a way of thinking about it like, "Hey, this is how we make this work." And as technology has always been and only continues to speed at evolving, it's changing the way that we have to look at these things, whether it be just logistically speaking, the ability to do this, in this case, the tracking. Or the fact that there's new ways. Now, there's a certain percentage going to AI-oriented search or just dropping search entirely, right? Now, it's all going to be using your AIs to get the answers to your questions rather than going to the search platforms. So, of course, you have to evolve with that, but it's hard for us humans to sometimes move as quickly as the technology is moving around us in that regard, right? So, some of these stories you're telling, I think, I mean, that human side, that ability to adapt to the technology that is only moving faster and faster and faster and faster, particularly when we talk about artificial intelligence as the buzzword here, comes about. That's just what I'm seeing in my experience is talking to people. And it's frustrating for us, too, because keyword research for ranking on Google, we were awesome at keyword research. That's been one of the primary things we've done for 15 years. You need a website, cool. Let's start with messaging and keyword research. And now keyword research, we'll still do occasionally, but most of the time, it's not worth the effort to do that. Let's make sure you rank off your name and let's take that effort from the keyword research into short form video and other places, which, again, it's working well, but, dang, keyword research, we had a process down for that. We were awesome at it. We had great results, and it's just, but things change, and we're not going to keep doing it just because we're good at it. We want to do what's going to actually bring results, and you've got to change with the times. There we are. And sometimes those result-based tracking and such that you're talking about, I find even within my own business, the what I'm tracking, the metrics I'm tracking, the, or for the clients, that what we're trying to actually keep track of, it does really come back to that ultimate goal of the sale or these key points, of course, the sale for any business is going to keep it alive. But there may be some other leading indicators, but they're usually something harder than more substantial, I should say, to track than what we used to do in the past, which was just a click action or something that didn't mean a whole lot. So that's been interesting to see. For sure. Okay, well, so going back to your business, I guess, how have you been deciding kind of based on the platform of things we've been talking about here today? Well, how have you been deciding what technologies and tools to continue to implement? You mentioned you've been adjusting this, this, your models around how you're getting away from the keyword research, right, and going towards the short-term video. But there's dozens of different marketing things or technologies that you could explore, say, in that case, with your clients. For that matter, internally to your business, what technology tools have you been using and how you've been deciding what opportunities to take? Because as we've seen over the years, the explosion of marketing and sales technology or just business technology in general, the choices are endless. So how have you been thinking about what to do next? Is it kind of as it becomes visible in your view and you just kind of go down to that road? Or is it more strategic and like, okay, we want to maybe attack this area of the market or this area of our business. And you kind of do more of an apples to apples comparison of technologies and tools or opportunities. Just talk about that part of it here in the last year or two for Green Mellon. Yeah, so that's a great question. So between Ali and then Robert on our team and myself, we often are kind of on the forefront of at least seeing what's out there. And so we're always talking and debating, should we try this? Should we try that? It usually would try it with us first. We'll try with Green Mellon first to see if it works for us, see how it works. And again, it may not work for us, could work for client, but we still want at least get our hands wet and see see what's going on with that. So that's part of it there. The other part you mentioned with all the technology like tools coming out, that I certainly say up to date with all that stuff, but it frustrates me a little bit because there's two big things that seem to come out of those a lot. And it's more automation and more AI. And I don't think that's always the answer. I mean, automation and AI are both great things. But historically for heck, the last 15 years, I've kind of shied away from automation to a large degree, just because it's replacing humans in places, it doesn't need to replace humans. You know, in our case, like I talked about our CRM, we use the platform to manage the leads coming into Green Mellon. I don't have any automations on that. Like if someone reaches out to us, I'm going to have a conversation with them. I'm going to reach out to them next week and talk to them some more and like, I don't need to be automating stuff to them. Like it's just silly. And there's cases where you do need that. If you have smaller ticket items, you need to make thousands of sales a month to make it work. Like you need some of that stuff, but people jump to automations right away. Like how can I do it with my business? And you don't always need to. Sometimes just being a human is better. And the same with AI. Like we use AI quite a bit. I'm sure we'll get into more of that in this talk, but it's not always about AI. Like we're considering moving from click up back to Asana maybe for project management. And that's, we'll see what happens there. The one turn off is if I go to Asana's website right now, it's all about all the AI stuff they've baked in. Like, yes. Oh, I don't want that in project management. The AI dust, the AI dust, like literally the little sprinkle dust. And that's, they all feel they have to do that. And maybe it's good, but with Asana stuff, I don't want that. I want to like see my projects and see my tasks and assign new people and track what's going on and leave feedback. And like AI, adding AI to it's not a bad thing, but I worry if their focus is on AI instead of the core tool, they may drift a little bit. It's, you know, like Evernote we saw over the years where they had a core tool that was great and they drifted into all these ancillary things and very common just fall apart. Yeah. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Evernote. I'm talking a decade ago with Evernote where they were getting to menu planning and photography. I don't remember what all it was, but their core tool suffered as a result. So I'm hoping tools like Asana, sure, add some AI is not bad, but if that's your big focus, like that could be problematic. So we'll see where it shakes out. Definitely. Yeah. The magic fairy daced dust of AI is definitely a problem. It's something I've talked about. I have had a slide in my talks for years just around technology, not just AI, about how technology is not magic. You know, it requires you as a business person, as a leader to think through strategically what you're trying to use this technology for. Yeah. And then just the, it's a version of scope creep with regards to these technology companies. It's going to be interesting to see how that plays out because everyone's jumping on, sprinkling on AI to their existing technologies. But then there's also some companies starting from an AI first perspective. So what will that do as you're starting from an AI truly AI perspective, not a just add AI to what we already have. And so there's probably going to be certain types of customers like you and I that have been doing this for 20 years that you have a certain way of doing it that we probably, we probably going to hang on to the old way a little bit and try to sprinkle the AI in. But then there's going to be a whole new generation of tools and workers that are going to think about things more from the perspective of natural language and this more AI first model. And we don't even know what that means yet necessarily, but that's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. And then you know, over time we'll all adapt and see what the winners are going to be. Well said. Yeah. Now I see things like lovable. If you play with lovable, it's a language processing app development tool. You just kind of talk, you just kind of talk, I want to app that does this and does that. And like it's, it's again, AI first, it's not adding AI to a tool. The tool is AI. And so yeah, as people do that for marketing, for building websites where it's not adding it out of your process, but building thumb scratch with AI, that'll be fascinating to watch and interesting to see how quick folks like you and I can make the switch when the time comes. So yeah. Well, we're already making the switch with regards to just how AI has affected things in the last few years. I mean, kind of in the realm of what you're talking about there, those tools that allow you say to start building an app. Okay. They are, my perspective on those at this point, at least sitting here today talking, is that they're able to help you get going, maybe create a wireframe, kind of a initial structure or UI, get some initial pieces going, but you still need a developer. Yeah, you still need somebody to help. And this is true for like the website builders and many of the tools out there that are AI either first or enhanced, whatever, however we're looking at it. But, but the right now we're talking about app development. So I'll just say that. So okay, you need, you need that. But now over time, they will only become multimodal more and more. So this is what we see currently say with the primary frontier models, the primary tools, the chat GPTs and such, is that they start out just as a chat tool that basically could do some basic things. The fact they couldn't even look at now, they were only looking at the past, right? And then quickly they got the current and the, you know, the current situation added, then they started adding the imagery components and, you know, the ability to link to all their integrations, to all their tools and all these things started getting added became multimodal. And we're going to see similar things in the case of like, in this case, to app develop or website development. So it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. But that's another version, another iteration of that, which you were talking about earlier with some of the project management tools or whatever, there's, there's a component of in the past, it was about integration or expansion within that platform. And now like these other, these, these AI tools and such, they're kind of doing the same starting that same game, but it's more like full functions, full job functions. It's not just like another feature. So like, it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out. It is similar in that they're just adding integrations, but the integrations they add aren't like a cute little thing to talk to your account. It's a whole full AI piece there. Right. It's all their job. Right. So it'll be interesting to play out. But oh, let's come back to your business though, again here. So I guess you were talking about kind of some of that skepticism around AI and tools. So, and you brought up the example of maybe making a change in your project management system. So maybe talk about where you are using artificial intelligence or any other newer generation tools in the business right now. Gotcha. So yeah. So AI, I'm using more for research. It's still helpful for that. I added, actually blogged about it recently. I saw someone else post about, I say, Hey, here's people I'm meeting with next week and just kind of dump a list of names and email addresses in there. Tell me what's going on with them and the way it can parse out like just based on the email extension and where they work and then seeing what's happening with that company, like it gives back a beautiful list. So things like that for research with notebook LM and just other tools for research we use quite a bit. As an agency, we don't use it a ton beyond that. I mean, we'll use it for helping like edit writing a little bit. We're not using it to write content yet. I suspect we will at some point. I still think humans are better, but not by much and it's closing fast. And at some point humans won't be better and clients are going to pay shouldn't pay extra to have a human right it because they're again, their goal is not to support an agency. Their goal is to get sales. And if we can provide the same content with AI that a human could do, then we will, which is unfortunate because we have some awesome copywriters we contract with that we won't at some point in the future. But but we're keeping an eye on that again, we're still all human there, but that'll change at some point. But yeah, it's really just kind of playing with AI tools. We're not doing a ton with it, but just lots of lots of stuff around the edges playing with it, see what's going on, help them plan and strategize and kind of watch our backs for things and see what's going on. So that's a lot of where we are. My favorite tool these days is really not AI focused at all, but Spark Toro. We mentioned rain before. So yeah, you brought that up earlier. Tell us about that. Yes. So Spark Toro is fantastic. I think the biggest problem people have is figuring out where their clients are online. I say, you know, they're finding the answers and then coming back to Google, where are they finding that for your business? Are they on tiktok? Are they on LinkedIn? Are they on Facebook? Are they on Instagram? Are they on Claude versus Chachi BT or what podcast or what subreddits or just where are they? And Spark Toro is a tool that helps figure that out. You say, Hey, people that visit this website, where do they tend to go? Or people with this title in their job bios, where do they tend to go? So you type in something and it says, all right, people that have this title tend to spend time in these specific subreddits. Here's some podcasts they listen to. They're not on Facebook very much, but they're on LinkedIn a lot. And, you know, it kind of gives you tools to figure out where to be and then you go be with them. I think you and I have found before finding the finding the watering hole for your, for your target, essentially. Yeah, figure out where they are and follow them. Like you and I have talked about Gary Vaynerchuk before. I'm sure for those that don't know me, search for Gary Vaynerchuk or Gary Vee. He's a interesting fellow. I'm sort of appreciating him more as the years go on. He's kind of hard edged. But one thing I love, one thing he said I love is he's huge on TikTok right now. He has millions of followers and videos and millions of views. And someone asked him, they said, Gary, if TikTok does go away, if the government shuts it down, what are you going to do? What happens? He said, I don't care. Like all those people are going to go somewhere else. I'm going to go with them. Like, so he just said, I'm just going to follow my audience where they need to be. I'm going to continue to engage with them and be there with them. So it's not about having this one platform and risk losing. He's like, I'll just go where the people are and spark Toros away for smaller people that don't have millions of followers to figure out where the best places are to go. It's a good way to do this. So we use that as part of our research with every client. We use some spark Toros and some other tools. But just to figure out, like, I'm not going to say, Josh, I think you should be on LinkedIn and not on Facebook and maybe here. Like, we'll start with that, but let's do the research and figure out where your audience really is and then go be there with them to, again, so they can see how great you are, see what your stuff offers. And then they'll go to Google and type in your name because they've understood how great you are. And then they'll see your awesome website and they'll sign up and you'll be friends for life. Yeah, great. Well, I mean, there's definitely an element here of particularly in B2B type enragements, but it could be true for B2C type marketing as well for small and mid-sized businesses, which our businesses are and many of our clients are in that category, where we don't need, we might need, if we're B2C, we might need thousands or maybe tens of thousands. If we're B2B, we might not need, we don't need tens of thousands, for sure. We don't need even thousands for our B2B type environment if you're small and mid-sized businesses. You're probably needing hundreds. The point is, my point is, you don't have to own this massive part of the market. A lot of marketing and a lot of these tools are marketed as in this concept of the high gross startup or the high volume sale. And of course, there are marketplaces or some of these people listening here that are in that world, so we're not downplaying that. But even then, think about it, how many do you actually need? And if you probably have that number somewhere, or maybe it's not always first in mind, but if it isn't, you should be posting it up somewhere where it is. No matter if you're, I guess what I'm trying to say is a moderate-sized volume company versus a small volume company, wherever you land in that, knowing that number and then helping you're using tools like this to help you then dive into that segment that you can really find those people, that's what we're talking about. That's how we're talking about being strategic about how we're using our marketing a lot, that's what we're talking about today, but we're talking about marketing technology tools that help us find those and attack those and not get lost in the sea of opportunities that we have. Right. And that's kind of what we talked about with automation. We don't need to be automated if you're only going after a few people, like three quick examples. One, for us, we can do two kickoffs a month. We can start two new projects a month. I mean, that's it. If there's more than that, we don't need a zillion leads. We need two great leads every month, and that's awesome. We have one new client. They said, "Hey, if you guys can get us one new client every month, this will be a smashing success." And we have one other new client who said, "If you can get us one new client per year, this will be a smashing success." That's a pretty small pool. It's a small pool, but it's also a challenge. That's probably our biggest challenge, because there are six-figure clients that they go after. They do training stuff, and so that one scares me the most. It's easier to say, "Hey, we're going to go from 10 to 12 or whatever, but just get one new client a year from our stuff." And then again, to measure exactly where it came from, because they get some clients. So how do we know if they get seven this year, how many came because of our efforts? And it's going to be almost impossible to know, but it's going to be just, we'll measure, we'll show them what we can. We'll say, "Here's how people worked on the website," because how much engaged on social, and we'll give all the data we can, but it's hard to know for sure. Again, even if we ask them, "How did you find us?" Well, I heard about you from a friend, and then I saw you on Facebook, and it's going to be a variety of things, some of which we touched and some of which we didn't. And so, were we responsible for that lead or not? And it's tricky. But yeah, I've been there too with clients, that kind of situation over the years in different environments. And I think this kind of brings us back to a lot of what we're talking about today. Your themes here today have been that, of course, you use technology. It's your entire business. It's all around what you do. But it's also the idea of being smart about how we're inserting the human mind into this. And it sounds like in this particular client example you're bringing up, there's no way to actually make technology help you be able to prove this. But it's going to be the intuition of the human, bringing together all the technology tools, maybe bringing together some AI research summaries and different things to show the value that you're providing to your client in this case. And ultimately, then being able to continue to serve them and continue to stay on top of the technology that you all do there to be able to serve them further going forward. I guess one more thing I want to bring up that I think is important is you talked about again here about the automation, like not jumping into automation too quickly. And I do think that's something I've seen over the years with small and mid-sized businesses is begin because of the way it's marketed and because of the way we think about the computers taking over again, even before we talk about AI taking over, like the idea of jumping into the automation before we actually have a proven process, some kind of actual SOP that we put in place that actually fits to put automation on top of. That is important to be considering as well. And it also just goes inside with what you're talking about. When we're talking about trying to get one or a dozen clients for a customer in your case over the course of a year, automating that, you're wasting time automating that because you don't actually have a proven process yet. You're going to figure out the process, but it's probably going to have to evolve too because of all these other factors we've been talking about today with the change of technology and where you have to search. So being more nimble without automation actually couldn't make sense in these examples you're bringing up. That's true. And automation, the problem with automation is so compelling. It's so sexy looking to say, "Man, just automate all this and just have it all do it for me while I sleep and it's great." And again, it's not always the case. Like an example there, we had a HVAC client. We built a new website for a few years ago and they said, "We want a simple page." It was really just a one-page beautiful site because they said, "We're in the community. People know us." And it is funny if I say, "Do you guys know, if I talk to friends, do you know this HVAC company?" Those that do say, "Oh my gosh, I love them so much." You don't hear this about home services companies like this, but then about a year ago, or it's two years ago, they said, "Hey, Greenwell, we're moving to a different company now." And they got sucked into this giant like just hamster wheel of automation and all this chaos. And then sure enough, six months ago they said, "Actually, do you still have our old site? Can we just go back to that because this automation stuff isn't really making a difference. We're pouring all this money in and doing all this stuff and it's not who we are. We're in the community. We go to events. We know people. They love us. It's just, yeah, stay true to who we are." So they went back to being human and the results are flourishing. So there's a case for that. Again, there's some HVAC companies that don't have that and they do need to just churn out the automations and kind of make it happen and see what they can grind out the bottom. But I much prefer the ones that when I say, "Hey, do you know this company?" People say, "Oh, I do know them. They're so great." And yeah, I mean, the quick story about them is when we first signed them years ago, they walked to our office to kick off. They brought a check with them and a tray of cookies. I'm like, that pretty much sums up. Who does that? It was fantastic. They became our favorites right then. So yeah. That's great. And your firm attracts those types of companies and individuals because you have that customer first mentality and also the want to actually be authentic in what you're doing. And I appreciate that. Yeah, we'll say we're team first, customer second. But yeah, I mean, we still put customer up pretty high. You're people. You're human first. Let's put it that way. Yeah, and maybe that's a way to also, as we're wrapping up here, put a bow on this in regards to talking about the technologies and the AIs and all the things. Again, a theme today I think I've heard is this idea of keeping the human in the driver's seat and allowing them, allowing you and your firm to be able to serve your customers and your team and whatnot in a human first way. And that is a theme I think we're hearing in the greater technology world right now around artificial intelligence is keep the human in the loop. And that's true for technology in general. Keep the human in the loop and continually be evolving with it and making sure that we're not losing our humanists and losing our ability to orchestrate this great technology tools that we have available to us. So okay, okay, go ahead. I was going to say, I don't think that that counters technology either though, because I'm probably as geeky as you are as anyone you know, I mean, I'm on three monitors right now and I have a note system that I don't even suggest to because it's so complicated and crazy. But I think all that can lead toward more human like in my note system, it has a reminder that'll pop every so often. Hey, you haven't talked to Joshua in a while, you should reach out to him like, so I'm using technology to make things more human, you know, saying with the tools we use, like with ClickUp, you know, we use ClickUp, we don't have clients come in there and see stuff. It just reminds Brooke, our project manager, like, hey, we need to check in with that client. So she'll reach out to him to, hey, hey, Steve, we haven't talked to you this week. Have you had a chance to look at the design yet? Like, you can use technology to be more human. You don't have to go analog, although I know some folks that are still largely analog and that can work too. But I'm as technology driven as it can be, but you can still use that to be more human. And I think there's a good balance in somewhere. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I hope and pray that that was the way that we will continue to push forward with these tools that are cropping up in the next number of years here for sure. Okay, so as we, as we wrap up here, I do want to get to the final question here. What is one actual tip that you would give businesses looking to leverage technology better here as we wrap up on this call today? And I think I'll just, I think there's two things I'll reiterate. We've already kind of covered this. I don't think I'm going to make up something new because the two best tips we've had is one, use technology to be more human. I think that kind of overarching thing. And then more specific, I would say go look at spark Torah or other tools like that and figure out where your clients are. That's where people lack. They want to just blast stuff out when people say they want to do an email blast. I know what they're saying, but like, oh, that word just irks me like we're not trying to blast things when it's like, go where people are, reach out to them individually, like, don't just blast because people post stuff on social media and post stuff everywhere, just they post, post, post, post, post, they're not actually engaging and can get connecting with folks. And that's problematic. So spark Torah, I think is a good tool just to say, Hey, my people are on LinkedIn, I'm going to go engage on LinkedIn and go publish on there for sure. But I'm also going to respond to comments and like other things and just kind of be a human in the places where people are. So you can use technology to be human and use things like spark Torah to figure out where to go be a human, where your clients are. If you don't know already, some people probably already know, like, no, my best clients are here. This is what this is where my community is. We have a community on TikTok or whatever like cool, go do that. But if you don't know that tool can help and whatever it is. Yeah, use technology to help you streamline your humanity, I guess is a good way to put it, Dave. Great. That's awesome. Well, this has been great. Where can people find out more about you and Green Mellon if they want to reach out? Sure. So you're a company's GreenMellonMedia.com. You can spell it any way you want because you won't spell Mellon right the first try and that's okay, GreenMellonMedia.com. And then I'm Mick Mell, M-I-C-K-M-E-L, MickMell.com. I blog at every day. That's Mick Mellon, my handle on all the socials. You can hit me at MickMellonGmail.com. Just yeah, type in Mick Mellon, you'll find all my stuff. So make it easy. Perfect. Well, thanks for joining me today. Yeah, appreciate it, man. Thank you. Good to see you. All right, folks. That's it for today. I'm Joshua McNary and I hope you will join me again next time so you can learn how to become a BizTech superhero. Bye now.